Author Dana Lockhart

National Novel Writing Month. It is both the bane of writers and the savior. Write the rough draft of a novel in one month, they said. It’s 100% possible, they said. It will be fun, they said. I don’t know who they are, but they’re a totally different type of person than I am. After four years of participating, I’ve never won a single year of NaNoWriMo yet. And I’m perfectly okay with that. Sure, NaNo might have all these rules and expectations, but in the end, it’s your goals that matter, not theirs. When Is the Best Time to Write? Write now! My goal for NaNoWriMo has always just been to write. Almost always, NaNo has been my excuse to either finish a story I was already working on, or at least make a big dent in it. If I’d been unable to get a word down for months, November became the dedicated month to get over that. Sure, I kept that 50k finish line in mind, too, but it was never my actual goal. NaNo and me, we don’t mix very well. The arguably biggest rule of NaNoWriMo is to neve...

-The Story, The Legend, The Blood Knight - I’m super duper excited by this, guys. The Blood Knights series, as I have said multiple times, is the most vivid world I’ve ever created. It’s so alive that I don’t quite feel like I’m in control of it. More than once a character has veered off on their own chosen path against what I had originally intended. Villains grew up to be heroes, heroes turned out to be villains. New characters I didn’t have in the original concept just popped out of nowhere demanding to be seen. It’s been a wild ride to see all the stories unfold. The Blood Knight is the first in the intended trilogy. It centers on Archer Mathews, a vampire hunter that makes a grave mistake and is turned into the thing he hates most. The thing is, he should have died instead. Hunters are almost a breed of supernatural beings of their own, with fast reflexes and heightened senses tuned into finding evil, and something in their blood won’t let them be corrupted into monsters. The cl...

I'm going to go ahead and call it because there's no way I'm hitting 50k by Saturday.  I'm currently sitting on 17,500.  I gave up on November 12th. And I'll tell you why. -I'm Not a Word Vomiter- Never have been, never will. I hate vomiting out words without going through and editing as I go along.  It slows things down by the time you start reaching 10k words. But I did manage to push through that because I was excited to write.  I wanted to just crank out the story and go back and edit later.  I wanted to.  But when I tripped and failed to make the daily word count my dislike for word vomiting returned.  I realized I was about 5k words away from reaching the end of what I had planned for my novel and suddenly wouldn't know where to go from there. -I Didn't Quit, I Just Shifted My Focus- At that point, I decided to change my goals for NaNoWriMo.  What I had wanted from NaNo all along was just to finish book one of my novel, Blood Knights . ...

I’m writing now about trying to get through writer’s block because I’m currently in a writer’s block, but I don’t even really have any business writing about getting over writer’s block because I’m not very good at it myself. So let’s dive right in! -Write Something Else- First off, even when I’m in a writer’s block, I still try and exercise my ability to write – like doing this blog!   I journal daily and can easily punch out 3-5k words per day just talking about what I did the day before.   It’s probably needlessly detailed so that if I ever re-read my journal when I’m 60 I’m going to wonder why I thought it was important to mention how I bought this brand of milk at this specific store after work that one day 40 years ago to make this certain kind of dessert.   So if something can be learned from that – even if you have no creative spark to write a story, try and write something that you can word vomit.   If not journaling your own life, write about what you thoug...

It's Day 6 and the drive to complete that novel is dissipating.  You're looking for distractions to keep yourself from writing.  Here is a list of 5 distractions so that you can just do them and get them out of the way so you can get back to writing.  I'm trying to focus on productive distractions so that you're still keeping those creative juices flowing, even if it's not towards your novel. -Write a Blog Post- Got a website?  Write a blog post.  I'm totally not distracting myself from my own novel right now.  Nope.  Totally not.  Try and focus your blog post in the NaNoWriMo direction:  talk about the novel you're writing, the progress you've made, how many activities (writing sprints/dares) you've participated in, or tips you think would help someone complete their goal.  Try and be that inspiration for someone else to get back at it, as well as yourself. -Peruse the NaNoWriMo Website- There's a lot of little creative things to do on ...

NaNoWriMo is upon us, and I've elected to use my 50,000 words to make a dent in, and hopefully finish, my novel-in-progress called "Blood Knights." I've made a new NaNo account for my pen name projects and added information about the novel to my account, including the synopsis and an excerpt.  The excerpt takes place several chapters into the novel, but it's a relatively neutral piece that doesn't spoil anything and doesn't need much explaining if you read the synopsis, so it seemed like a good fit. To save you a click, here is the synopsis if you think it's something you'd like to read: The city of Danube is home to three separate vampire covens: the Tepes in the north, the Bathory in the west, and the de Rais in the south. These three clans have been at relatively peaceful odds for centuries, with themselves and the vampire hunters that also call Danube home. However, now tensions are beginning to escalate for control over the lawless east, war...